In The Post-Trust Era no one believes anything anyone says-not at first anyway. The reasons are simple, we are constantly being lied to about how New, Improved, and Updated everything we buy is.
You want to believe that you are getting a good deal, you want to trust people, but you know that everyone wants something from you. Stores want you to buy stuff, websites want clicks, restaurants want you to buy their food instead of the food from the place across the street.
The Language of Trust teaches you how to win a little bit of trust from your audience and get them to give you a shot. There are lists of words to use and lists of words to avoid. Don’t tell people your Widget is the best in the world, tell the customer that they are the most important part of your company, keep it simple.
There are many examples of how to be personal, be plainspoken, be positive, be plausible, and how to put their interests before yours. There is a good mix of the theoretical and the practical, though sometimes the talk about negative selling and the importance of be earnest seem a little over the top. I am reminded of the old joke-It’s all about sincerity, once you can fake that you have it made.
The Language of Trust has the feeling that it wants to change the world of advertising and PR and lead us all into more honest relationships with our customers and ourselves. And yet at the same time it is an instruction book on how to use trust and honesty in the same ways that half truths and hyperbole have been used in the past. The ideas are appealing and I am sure that the techniques will work, at least for a little while.
